Attempting to improve the AI for Proportions 3.05

[gosho mladenoff]

Thanks for the info Psycho. I 'll give it a try.
Can't wait for the update PvK.


ggm

[Arralen]

Any news on the AI improvements .. and 3.07, maybe ? ;-)

[PvK]

I expect Proportions AI improvements will only happen in one of two cases:

1) Someone besides me wants to spend time coding and testing them. I am available to explain how things work and give ideas and guidance.

2) I suddenly decide to devote a bunch of time to doing it myself. Might happen some time, but my guess is not. It's not that it's entirely unappealing, just that I have so many other things I'd probably choose to do instead. Hearing about people who would actually play it does increase the odds, though, so thanks very much to everyone who's expressed interest!

[Atrocities]

SE IV AI sucks monkey balls. I have worked with it and worked with it and the best I can do is get it to piss me off. When the AI doesn't even follow the game rules, hard coded limits such as One Component Only, or there is no way to correctly tell the AI that you must have X amount of X type of specific type of component or ship, aside from major guess work that only works at X level then is ignored at Y level, modding the AI becomes an escalating source of absolute frustration.

[PvK]

Yes, it requires a lot of patience, guesswork and time for trial and error. We did figure out quite a bit, but still what was we ended up doing was watching what the AI did, then tweaking, then watching what it did, over and over in great detail. Which was actually fun but time consuming and sometimes (or often) frustrating. And yes there are limits on how good it can actually get, and to really challenge an experienced player, it probably needs some unfair advantages.

[Urendi Maleldil]

One thing that I have mentioned before however, is that the game reloads the AI script each turn. Therefore it would be possible to have an external program modify the AI files between turns, which could yield more "intelligent" AI.

Such a program could read and respond to conditions described by the game in the external log files, and help the AI react better to in-game actions.

[PvK]

Could do, with logging turned on, though what kind of information can SE4 be made to log?

[Suicide Junkie]

If you're going to be using an external program, getting info back out will be the tough part.

Perhaps an autohotkey program to use the existing SE4 UI... open all the dialogs and extract all the details into a nice text format.

Then it could run your AI.exe to create an orders file to read... and finally some hammering on the SE4 UI to plug the orders into the game before hitting end turn.


To heck with using the built-in AIs How about writing your AI in whatever language you like, and playing with all the options of the human interface?

[Ironmanbc]

HA if we could do that then I would leave the Ministers on and let them do my turns while I sleep

[Suicide Junkie]

I will make the UI interface if somebody wants to make the AI program.